Research methods in legal translation and interpreting lucja biel, jan engberg, routledge, 2019 scan

Research Methods in Legal
Translation and Interpreting

The field of legal translation and interpreting has strongly expanded over recent
years. As it has developed into an independent branch of Translation Studies, this
book advocates for a substantiated discussion of methods and methodology, as
well as knowledge about the variety of approaches actually applied in the field. It
is argued that, complex and multifaceted as it is, legal translation calls for research
that might cross boundaries across research approaches and disciplines in order
to shed light on the many facets of this social practice. The volume addresses the
challenge of methodological consolidation, triangulation and refinement. The
work presents examples of the variety of theoretical approaches which have been
developed in the discipline and of the methodological sophistication which is
currently being called for. In this regard, by combining different perspectives,
they expand our understanding of the roles played by legal translators and
interpreters, who emerge as linguistic and intercultural mediators dealing with
a rich variety of legal texts; as knowledge communicators and as builders of
specialised knowledge; as social agents performing a socially situated activity; as
decision-makers and agents subject to and redefining power relations, and as
political actors shaping legal cultures and negotiating cultural identities, as well
as their own professional identity.
Łucja Biel is Associate Professor and Head of Corpus Research Centre at the
Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, Poland, where she teaches
and researches legal translation. She is Secretary General of the European Society
of Translation Studies (EST) and editor-in-chief of the JoSTrans Journal of
Specialised Translation. She has participated in a number of internationally and
nationally funded research projects on legal and institutional translation. Her
research interests focus on legal/EU translation, legal terminology, translator
training and corpus linguistics. She has published over 50 papers in this area, e.g.
in The Translator, Meta: The Translators’ Journal, The Interpreter and Translator

Trainer, Fachsprache, LANS-TTS and a book Lost in the Eurofog. The Textual Fit
of Translated Law (Peter Lang, 2014).
Jan Engberg, PhD is Professor of Knowledge Communication at the School of
Communication and Culture, University of Aarhus, Denmark. He teaches legal
as well as financial translation at BA and MA level, as well as other branches of


text-oriented foreign language skills. His main areas of research interest are the
study of translation and mediation of knowledge in the field of law, texts and
genres in the academic field, cognitive aspects of domain-specific discourse and
the relations between specialised knowledge and text formulation as well as basic
aspects of communication in domain-specific settings. His research focus is upon
communication and translation in the field of law. He is editor-in-chief of the
international journal Fachsprache and member of the editorial or advisory boards
of a substantial number of international scholarly journals.
M. Rosario Martín Ruano is Associate Professor at the University of
Salamanca, Spain, where she is a member of the Research Group on Translation,
Ideology and Culture and where she currently leads the research project
entitled VIOSIMTRAD (‘Symbolic Violence and Translation: Challenges
in the Representation of Fragmented Identities within the Global Society’,
FFI2015–66516-P; MINECO/FEDER, UE). Her research interests include
legal and institutional translation, translation and ideology, and gender and postcolonial approaches to translation. She has published widely on these issues,
including a number of books and co-edited collective volumes, as well as more
than 50 chapters and articles in journals such as The Interpreter and Translator
Trainer (ITT), TTR, JoSTrans, Linguistica Antverpiensia, etc., and in volumes
by Routledge, Multilingual Matters, John Benjamins, St Jerome, etc. She is a
member of the editorial board of Perspectives, Estudios de Traducción, Clina and a
reviewer for a number of specialised journals (Target, Meta, JoSTrans, Language
and Intercultural Communication, MonTI, etc.). She has been a practising
translator since 1997.

Vilelmini Sosoni is Assistant Professor at the Ionian University, Greece. She
teaches legal and economic translation as well as other branches of specialised
translation. She has participated in a number of internationally and nationally
funded research projects on legal translation and translation technology. Her
research interests lie in the areas of legal and institutional translation, corpus
linguistics, intercultural communication and translation technology. She
has published widely on these topics, including articles in journals such as
Perspectives, JoSTrans, mTm, Journal of Language and Law, etc. and in volumes
by Routledge, John Benjamins, Springer, etc. She is a member of the editorial
board of JoSTrans and Intercultural and Intersemiotic Translation. She has been
a practising translator since 1997.



Law, Language and Communication
Anne Wagner
Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, France

Vijay Kumar Bhatia

formerly of City University of Hong Kong

This series encourages innovative and integrated perspectives within and across
the boundaries of law, language and communication, with particular emphasis
on issues of communication in specialized socio-legal and professional contexts.
It seeks to bring together a range of diverse yet cumulative research traditions in
order to identify and encourage interdisciplinary research.
The series welcomes proposals – both edited collections as well as singleauthored monographs – emphasizing critical approaches to law, language and
communication, identifying and discussing issues, proposing solutions to problems, offering analyses in areas such as legal construction, interpretation, translation and de-codification.
Synesthetic Legalities

Sensory Dimensions of Law and Jurisprudence
Edited by Sarah Marusek
Legal Persuasion
A Rhetorical Approach to the Science
Linda L. Berger and Kathryn M. Stanchi
International Arbitration Discourse and Practices in Asia
Edited by Vijay K Bhatia, Maurizio Gotti, Azirah Hashim, Philip Koh and
Sundra Rajoo
Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings
A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective
Edited by Stanislaw Gozdz Roszkowski and Gianluca Pontrandolfo
Fiction and the Languages of Law
Understanding Contemporary Legal Discourse
Karen Petroski
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Law-Language-and-Communication/book-series/LAWLANGCOMM


Research Methods in Legal
Translation and Interpreting
Crossing Methodological Boundaries

Edited by Łucja Biel, Jan Engberg,
M. Rosario Martín Ruano, and
Vilelmini Sosoni


First published 2019
by Routledge
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© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Łucja Biel, Jan Engberg, M.
Rosario Martín Ruano, and Vilelmini Sosoni; individual chapters, the
contributors.
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and Vilelmini Sosoni to be identified as the authors of the editorial
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Names: Biel, Lucja, 1974– author.
Title: Research methods in legal translation and interpreting : crossing
methodological boundaries / Lucja Biel, Jan Engberg, Rosario
Martâin, and Vilelmini Sosoni.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon [UK] ; New York, NY : Routledge,
2019. | Series: Law, language and communication | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018052675 (print) | LCCN 2018055536 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781351031226 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138492103 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Law—Translating. | Law—Language. | Semantics
(Law) | Court interpreting and translating. | Law—Interpretation
and construction. | Translators—Legal status, laws, etc. |
Translating and interpreting.
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Contents

Notes on contributorsix


Introduction to research methods in legal translation and
interpreting: crossing methodological boundaries

1

ŁUCJA BIEL, JAN ENGBERG, M. ROSARIO MARTÍN RUANO,
VILELMINI SOSONI

  1 Corpus methods in legal translation studies

13

GIANLUCA PONTRANDOLFO

  2 Implications of text categorisation for corpus-based legal
translation research: the case of international
institutional settings

29

FERNANDO PRIETO RAMOS

  3 Inverse legal translation: a corpus-driven study of
multi-word units related to the structure of translated
statutory provisions

48

JUSTYNA GICZELA-PASTWA

  4 Language of treaties – language of power relations?

66

MIIA SANTALAHTI AND MIKHAIL MIKHAILOV

  5 Explicitation in legal translation: a feature of expertise?
a study of Spanish–Danish translation of judgments

81

ANJA KROGSGAARD VESTERAGER

  6 Critical Discourse Analysis and the investigation of the
interpreter’s own positioning in a court hearing: a case
study from an Austrian criminal court
KAROLINA NARTOWSKA

98


viii  Contents
  7 How to apply comparative law to legal translation: a new
juritraductological approach to the translation of legal texts

115

SYLVIE MONJEAN-DECAUDIN AND JOËLLE POPINEAU-LAUVRAY

  8 A matter of justice: integrating comparative law methods
into the decision‑making process in legal translation

130

CARMEN BESTUÉ

  9 A mixed-methods approach in corpus-based interpreting
studies: quality of interpreting in criminal proceedings in Spain

148

MARIANA OROZCO-JUTORÁN

10 An online survey as a means to research the ‘outstitutional’
legal translation market

166

JULIETTE SCOTT

11 Interviewing legal interpreters and translators: framing
status perceptions and interactional and structural power

187

ESTHER MONZÓ-NEBOT

Index212


Contributors

Carmen Bestué is a trained Attorney and a Lecturer in Translation from English
into Spanish at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She holds a J.D.
degree in Law from the University of Barcelona, a University Degree in comparative law from the University of Paris II, Pantheon-Assas, and a PhD in
Translation Theory from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. From
2003 to 2016 she was the Director of the Postgraduate Degree in Legal Translation at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She has published many
articles in translation journals as well as a monograph entitled Los ­contratos

traducidos [Translated contracts].
Łucja Biel is Associate Professor and Head of Corpus Research Centre at the
Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, Poland, where she
teaches and researches legal translation. She is Secretary General of the European Society of Translation Studies (EST) and editor-in-chief of the JoSTrans
Journal of Specialised Translation. She has participated in a number of internationally and nationally funded research projects on legal and institutional
translation. Her research interests focus on legal/EU translation, legal terminology, translator training and corpus linguistics. She has published over 50
papers in this area, e.g. in The Translator, Meta: The Translators’ Journal, The
Interpreter and Translator Trainer, Fachsprache, LANS-TTS and a book Lost
in the Eurofog: The Textual Fit of Translated Law (Peter Lang, 2014).
Jan Engberg, PhD is Professor of Knowledge Communication at the School
of Communication and Culture, University of Aarhus, Denmark. He teaches
legal as well as financial translation at BA and MA level, as well as other
branches of text-oriented foreign language skills. His main areas of research
interest are the study of translation and mediation of knowledge in the field of
law, texts and genres in the academic field; cognitive aspects of domain-specific
discourse and the relations between specialised knowledge and text formulation as well as basic aspects of communication in domain-specific settings. His
research focus is upon communication and translation in the field of law. He
is editor-in-chief of the international journal Fachsprache and member of the
editorial or advisory boards of a substantial number of international scholarly
journals.


x  Contributors
Justyna Giczela-Pastwa is a translation researcher and translator trainer, currently working as an Assistant Professor at the University of Gdańsk. She was
a Visiting Lecturer at City University London (MA in Legal Translation) from
2012 to 2014. She holds a PhD in Linguistics, Postgraduate Diploma in Legal
and Business Translation (University of Gdańsk), and an MA in Music (Academy of Music in Gdańsk). She is the head of Specialized Translation Training
Research Group, University of Gdańsk; an external collaborator of the Corpus
Research Centre, University of Warsaw, and an expert in the Polish Normalisation Committee. Her academic interests include legal translation, specialised
inverse translation, corpus translation studies and translator training. She coedited the volume entitled Norm-Focused and Culture-Related Inquiries in

Translation Research (Peter Lang, 2016).
M. Rosario Martín Ruano is Associate Professor at the University of Salamanca, Spain, where she is a member of the Research Group on Translation, Ideology and Culture, and where she currently leads the research project
entitled VIOSIMTRAD (“Symbolic Violence and Translation: Challenges
in the Representation of Fragmented Identities within the Global Society”,
FFI2015–66516-P; MINECO/FEDER, UE). Her research interests include
legal and institutional translation, translation and ideology, and gender and
post-colonial approaches to translation. She has published widely on these
issues, including a number of books and co-edited collective volumes, as well
as more than 50 chapters and articles in journals such as The Interpreter and
Translator Trainer (ITT), TTR, JoSTrans, Linguistica Antverpiensia, etc., and
in volumes by Routledge, Multilingual Matters, John Benjamins, St Jerome,
etc. She is a member of the editorial board of Perspectives, Estudios de Traducción, Clina and a reviewer for a number of specialised journals (Target, Meta,
JoSTrans, Language and Intercultural Communication, MonTI, etc.). She has
been a practising translator since 1997.
Mikhail Mikhailov is Professor of Translation Studies (Finnish and Russian) at the
University of Tampere, Finland. During his academic carrier he has worked as
a lecturer in Moscow Linguistic University (1986–1994), as a researcher at the
Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1994–1999),
and as a researcher, lecturer and acting professor at the University of Tampere
(1999–). He was appointed full professorship as of 1.1.2014. Mikhail Mikhailov
compiles and collaborates in the compilation of multilingual corpora and develops web‑based corpus software. His research covers corpus‑based translation
studies with a particular focus on parallel and comparable corpora, terminolog­
ical studies and translation technologies. He works mainly with Russian-Finnish
and occasionally with Russian-English data. He is one of the authors of the
book Corpus Linguistics for Translation and Contrastive Studies (with Robert
Cooper) published by Routledge in 2016.
Sylvie Monjean-Decaudin is Professor at the Sorbonne University (France). She
holds a doctorate in French law from the University of Paris X (2010) and

Contributors xi
a doctorate in Spanish law from the University of Malaga, Spain (2010).
Her thesis on, The translation of law in judicial proceedings—a contribution to the study of legal linguistics,  was awarded the Research Prize of the
National School for Magistrates (Prix de la recherche de l’École Nationale de
la ­Magistrature) in 2011 and published by French legal publishing company
Dalloz in 2012. She founded the CERIJE (CEntre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en JuritraductologiE), which is the first interdisciplinary research centre
dedicated to “juritraductology”, in 2012.
Esther Monzó-Nebot is an Associate Professor at the Translation and Communication Studies Department, Universitat Jaume I. She is the director of the
master’s program “Research in Translation and Interpreting”, and coordinates
the research group “Translation and Postmonolingualism” (TRAP) and the
legal and administrative language section of Revista de Llengua i Dret/Journal
of Language and Law. Between 2013 and 2015 she was a Professor in the
Sociology of Translation and Interpreting at the Department of Translation
Studies of the University of Graz, Austria. Before that period, she had worked
as a translator at the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the
World Intellectual Property Organization. Her PhD thesis (2002) explored
the professional practice of sworn translators in Spain, combining textual and
sociological approaches. Her current research focuses on the uses of translation and interpreting in managing diversity and intercultural and intergroup
relations using mainly psychosocial approaches.
Karolina Nartowska (PhD) is an interpreting researcher, trainer and practitioner. She completed her postgraduate translation studies (German, Polish)
at the UNESCO Chair, Jagiellonian University. She holds a PhD in Interpreting Studies from University of Vienna. Her research explored the role
behaviour of court interpreters in criminal proceedings in both Austria and
Poland. Her academic interests focus primarily on community interpreting,
role(s) of interpreters in institutional settings, the power of interpreters, and
ethical standards. She has written several publications on court interpreting
and she is an international trainer providing presentations on court interpreting in cooperation with TEPIS.
Mariana Orozco-Jutorán is a professional translator and a Senior Lecturer in
Translation from English into Spanish at the Autonomous University of Barcelona since 1996. She holds a PhD in Translation Theory, for which she
received the Best Doctoral Thesis Award in 2005. She has been involved in
several funded research projects and is currently a member of two research

groups: TRAFIL (Translating Remote Philosophies to Facilitate Understanding), MIRAS (Intercultural Mediation), as well as the LEXTRA (Legal Translation Studies) research network. She has published a book and more than 30
articles in international translation journals and book chapters in publications
by John Benjamins, Multilingual Matters, Gunter Narr and others. She is a
member of the editorial boards and scientific committees of journals such as


xii  Contributors
Perspectives or Hermeneus. As a professional translator, she has worked in a
wide range of areas over the last twenty years.
Gianluca Pontrandolfo is currently Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Trieste
(IUSLIT, Department of Legal Language, Interpreting and Translation Studies), where he teaches general and specialised translation from Spanish into
Italian. He combines his activity as freelance translator with his academic and
research projects. His research activity focuses on translation-oriented legal
terminology and phraseology, from a contrastive (Spanish, Italian, English)
and corpus perspective. In line with his PhD thesis, which deals with a qualiquantitative study of legal phraseology in a trilingual corpus of criminal judgments (COSPE), his publications mainly focus on the relationship between
language and law. His research interests also include specialised genres, textual
analysis applied to translation, translator training and corpus linguistics. He is
a member of the Research Centre on Languages for Specific Purposes (CERLIS) of the University of Bergamo.
Joëlle Popineau-Lauvray is currently working as an Assistant Professor in translation studies at the University of Tours, France. She also teaches classes in
juritraductology at the Faculty of Law, University of Tours. She holds a Doctorate in Linguistics and Computer-aided Translation (1992) and a Maîtrise
in Specialized Translation (University of Lorraine, France) (1986). Her academic interests include linguistics, translation studies and didactics. She is a
full accredited researcher at the Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique (a CNRS
joint research unit); she is the Chair of CerLiCO, a French linguistics society.
Fernando Prieto Ramos is Full Professor of Translation and Director of the Centre for Legal and Institutional Translation Studies (Transius) at the University
of Geneva’s Faculty of Translation and Interpreting. With a background in
both translation and law, his work focuses on legal and institutional translation,
including interdisciplinary methodologies, international legal instruments and
specialised terminology. Former member of the Centre for Translation and
Textual Studies at Dublin City University, he has published widely on legal
translation and has received several research and teaching awards, including a

European Label Award for Innovative Methods in Language Teaching from
the European Commission, an International Geneva Award from the Swiss
Network for International Studies and a Consolidator Grant for his current
project on “Legal Translation in International Institutional Settings” (LETR­
INT). He has also translated for several organisations since 1997, including
five years as an in-house translator at the World Trade Organization (dispute
settlement team).
Miia Santalahti is a University Instructor and PhD student at the University of
Tampere, Finland. She teaches translation and interpreting in the language
pairs Russian-Finnish and English-Finnish, and is working on her doctoral
dissertation on the topic “Language of treaties – language of power relations?
Manifestations of power relations and impacts of translation activity in bilateral


Contributors xiii
treaties between Finland and Russia/USSR and Finland and Sweden”. She is
also a seasoned translator specialised in marketing texts, contracts and official
documents.
Juliette Scott is an independent researcher with 30 years’ experience of providing legal linguistic services to law firms, institutions and companies of all
dimensions. In particular, she works in the fields of international financial
crime, complex corporate litigation and legislation. Her PhD thesis entitled
Legal Translation Outsourced was published by Oxford University Press in
autumn 2018. Her research draws from a range of intersecting disciplines
such as corporate agency theory, functionalism, comparative law, genre theory,
interdiscursivity, and the concept of fitness-for-purpose, to inform the various
aspects of legal translators’ textual agency and the constraints under which
they operate. Scott has worked extensively towards legal translators’ professionalisation and attempts to reinforce links between academia and practice.
Vilelmini Sosoni is Assistant Professor at the Ionian University, Greece. She
teaches legal and economic translation as well as other branches of specialised
translation. She has participated in a number of internationally and nationally

funded research projects on legal translation and translation technology. Her
research interests lie in the areas of legal and institutional translation, corpus
linguistics, intercultural communication and translation technology. She has
published widely on these topics, including articles in journals such as Perspectives, JoSTrans, mTm, Journal of Language and Law, etc. and in volumes by
Routledge, John Benjamins, Springer, etc. She is a member of the editorial
board of JoSTrans and Intercultural and Intersemiotic Translation. She has
been a practising translator since 1997.
Anja Krogsgaard Vesterager, PhD is Research Assistant at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark, where she teaches translation of specialised texts between Danish and Spanish, among other things.
Her main areas of research interests are the study of translation strategies in
legal translation, explicitation and implicitation techniques in legal translation, the use of student peer feedback in translation training, and post-editing
of Google translations as a learning tool in translation classes. Her current
research focuses on the translation of judgments from Spanish into Danish.
She has published articles in international journals and edited volumes.



Introduction to research
methods in legal translation
and interpreting
Crossing methodological boundaries
Łucja Biel, Jan Engberg, M. Rosario
Martín Ruano, Vilelmini Sosoni
1 Recent developments in legal translation studies
There is no doubt that legal translation and interpreting is a strongly expanding
field both as an area of practice and as an area of research. At the level of practice, the volumes of legal translated texts have increased exponentially at international organisations, in public services and the private sector in recent years. Legal
translation is currently immersed in an ever-growing range of institutional, social
and communicative situations with new and diverse needs, often also merging
and overlapping with related activities like interpreting or other text-processing
operations.
In parallel, at the level of research, studies on legal translation have not merely

proliferated during the last three decades but have also increasingly widened
their focus and scope and gradually problematised the object of study of what
has emerged as a burgeoning field of inquiry. Indeed, Legal Translation, also
known as Legal Translation and Interpreting (LTI) or Legal Translation Studies (LTS), has gradually gained autonomy and recognition as a distinctive area
of Translation Studies (TS), even to the point of claiming to be a “discipline”
or “interdiscipline” in its own right, committed to contributing to a better
understanding of all aspects converging in this complex and multifaceted phenomenon, including its processes, products and agents (Prieto Ramos 2014,
p. 261). Considering its phases of development, LTS – as argued by Prieto
Ramos – currently experiences a phase of expansion and consolidation (2014,
pp. 271–272).
Sharing both a growing awareness of the complexity of legal translation as
a phenomenon and the goal to contribute to comprehensive explanations of
its workings in different contexts, a growing number of authors have recently
expressed the need to diversify, fine-tune and enrich existing theoretical models
and research methods in the field both in order to get a better understanding
of the role that legal translation plays in our contemporary world and in order
to contribute to a more responsible and “reflexive” practice (Koskinen 2008,
p. 152). Certainly, as an indication of the growing maturity of the field, research


2  Łucja Biel et al.
approaches to legal translation have diversified in recent years, paralleling the
evolution seen in the general discipline of TS (cf. Saldanha and O’Brien 2013;
Angelelli and Baer 2015; Mellinger and Hanson 2016; Sutter et al. 2017). In
this regard, Cao (2013, p. 422) observes that “[t]he source text and the source
language are not the only concern of translators and researchers”. Linguistic and
textual perspectives on legal translation have been enriched by research which has
increasingly incorporated larger social, historical, ideological, political and ethical considerations. At the same time, qualitative research has progressively been
informed and supplemented by empirical studies using quantitative methods,
resulting in increased methodological rigour and eclectism (Biel and Engberg

2013, p. 1). The discipline has been gradually taking on board an ever-growing
variety of quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods approaches, including
corpus-based, corpus-driven and corpus-assisted approaches, process research and
experimental methods, workplace studies, practitioner research, critical discourse
analysis (CDA), sociological and ethnographic studies, perspectives based on
knowledge communication theories and post-structuralist and critical approaches
applied to legal translation.
The significant growth in research and the diversification of research angles and
perspectives has certainly contributed to broadening our understanding of this
activity which has recently been defined as “a norm-governed human and social
behaviour, a text producing act of legal communication” (Cao 2013, p. 422).
In any event, as part of its development into an independent branch of TS, LTS
needs a more substantiated discussion over methods and methodology, as well
as knowledge about the variety of approaches actually applied in its field. Complex and multifaceted as it is, legal translation calls for further “methodological
eclectism and triangulation, as well as further integration along the interdisciplinary lines” (Biel and Engberg 2013, p. 1), i.e., for research that might cross
boundaries across research approaches and disciplines in order to shed light on
the many facets of this social practice.
One important area which requires integration is the field of legal interpreting, in particular court interpreting, which has developed separately as part of
Interpreting Studies. Much of the focus has been on norms, ethics, working
conditions and training, with a solid grounding in empirical data (Berk-Seligson
1990; Hale 2004; Blasco Mayor and del Pozo Triviño 2015; Monteoliva-García
2018). What legal translation and legal interpreting have in common is the crosssystemic and cross-cultural mediation of legal discourse; nevertheless, they seem
to be researched in two distinct parallel worlds. Interestingly, the internal boundary is more pronounced in research than in professional practice where court
translators and interpreters have joint qualifications in a number of countries.
This edited volume precisely addresses the challenge of consolidation, triangulation and methodological refinement. The contributions to the volume both
stand as examples of the variety of theoretical approaches which have been developed in the discipline and of the methodological sophistication which is currently
being called for. Thus, the volume maps and explores a range of complex methodological approaches integrating diverse theories and viewpoints. By crossing


Introduction to research methods 3

boundaries between complementary approaches – for instance, between quantitative methods and qualitative analysis – and by linking linguistic and textual
aspects to larger macrostructural and sociological factors on the one hand and
to legal factors on the other hand, the chapters in the volume build complex
methodological models which contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of legal translation and interpreting and of its implications, and which
thus allow for critical reflection on the future of research and of the profession.
Combining different perspectives, they enlarge our understanding of the role(s)
played by legal translators and interpreters, who emerge as linguistic and intercultural mediators dealing with a high variety of legal texts; as knowledge communicators and as builders of specialised knowledge; as social agents performing a
socially situated activity; as decision-makers and agents subject to and redefining
power relations; and as political actors shaping (legal) cultures and negotiating
cultural identities, as well as their own professional identity. In this regard, the
volume makes the discipline of Legal Translation and Interpreting Studies move
forward. By combining different research methods and perspectives, this collection both identifies and opens up new avenues for researching and practicing
these multidimensional social activities departing from an enlarged, comprehensive vision of LTI.

2 Contributions to the volume
This volume consists of an introduction by the editors and 11 contributions
which draw on different perspectives in order to present traditional methods and
construct new, inspiring methodological models for research in legal translation
and interpreting.
A concise description of the contributions to the volume makes it possible to
perceive both the level of theoretical integration in the methodological approaches
used and the broad scope of the findings presented. Departing from corpus linguistics, a number of contributions explore the possibilities of research on legal
translation both for a more accurate description of the activity of legal translators
and for a more effective and conscious praxis.
Quantitative methods are mainly represented by various applications of corpora which have gained significant popularity and productivity in LTS in the
last decade and have contributed to a major methodological advancement in the
field. The mainstream position of corpus methods is corroborated by the fact
that nearly half of the chapters apply corpora, to a varied degree, to study some
aspects of legal translation (see Pontrandolfo, Orozco-Jutorán, Prieto Ramos,
Santalahti and Mikhailov, Giczela-Pastwa). Corpora are typically defined as large

representative collections of texts in electronic form analysable with dedicated
software (cf. McEnery et al. 2006, pp. 4–5). Their popularity has been triggered
by the revival of interest in linguistics-related methods in TS combined with technological progress and improved functionalities of software which have allowed
scholars to work with big data and test their hypotheses more systematically and
objectively (Biel 2010). Following the emergence of corpus linguistics in the


4  Łucja Biel et al.
1980s and the postulates to apply it to TS since the early 1990s (cf. Baker 1993),
it was not until the late 2000s when we can observe a growing use of corpus
methods in LTS (Biel 2018). The chapter by Gianluca Pontrandolfo entitled
“Corpus Methods in Legal Translation Studies” is an excellent overview of how
corpora are applied to explore legal translation and what is trending in such applications. Pontrandolfo synthesises various avenues of corpus research into a range
of useful dichotomies, such as local versus global levels of analysis, qualitative
(manual) versus quantitative (semi-automatic) analysis, corpus-based versus corpusdriven approaches, monolingual versus multilingual corpus data, comparable versus parallel corpus data and, finally, translated versus non-translated language.
These dichotomies are not rigid, Pontrandolfo argues, and should be situated
along the cline. The author illustrates the discussion with relevant research projects, showing how corpus methods can uncover diverse facets of legal translation
by approaching it from mostly quantitatively oriented perspectives. These facets include formulaicity and various types of patterns in legal discourse, features
of translated legal language, functional equivalents of terms and other types of
units, translation techniques and strategies. In conclusion, Pontrandolfo highlights the need for methodological triangulation by an eclectic combination of
various strands of corpus research and a combination of different methods, that
is within-method and between-method triangulation, respectively (cf. Malamatidou 2017). The final section of Pontrandolfo’s chapter contains a list of most
popular concordancers, e.g. Wordsmith, Antconc, and Sketch Engine, which may
be of use to novices to corpus methods.
A quintessential example of methodological triangulation can be found in
Fernando Prieto Ramos’s chapter entitled “Implications of text categorisation for corpus-based legal translation research: the case of international institutional settings”, which combines corpus methods with genre analysis. Prieto
Ramos discusses theoretical and methodological aspects of legal text categorisation in relation to translation practice in three international institutions
(the European Union, the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation).
He demonstrates how the corpus compilation phase made it necessary, first,
to identify institutional genres among a mass of corpus files and, secondly, to

group them into higher-level functional categories representing the common
ground among the institutions. Based on actual text production practices, the
adjusted categorisation matrix was structured around the following categories: (1) law-making and policy-making, (2) implementation and compliance
monitoring, (3) adjudication, and (4) administrative functions. The functional
categories were further divided into key and secondary genres to better contextualise each genre and its position in the system of genres. This internal
organisation of a large corpus into an elaborate constellation of genres has
profound methodological implications for further phases of corpus creation
and enables a better calibration of the corpus in terms of representativeness,
balance and stratified sampling. Overall, Prieto Ramos’s chapter foregrounds
the importance of careful and rigorous corpus design to guard against biases
and to ensure the validity of empirical data and subsequent generalisations. By


Introduction to research methods 5
situating genres within the institutional system of genres, Prieto Ramos also
shows how corpus methods can improve our understanding of the context
of translation production, one of Saldanha and O’Brien’s key dimensions of
translation (2013, p. 205).
The next chapter by Justyna Giczela-Pastwa, “Inverse legal translation: a
corpus-driven study of multi-word units related to the structure of translated
statutory provisions”, shifts the perspective from the macrostructure to the microstructure. Giczela-Pastwa tests the applicability of corpus-driven methods to stud­ying inverse legal translation, that is translation rendered by non-native speakers
into their non-mother tongues. Despite being a common market practice in many
countries, inverse translation has hardly been studied, in particular with regard
to legal translation. For this purpose, Giczela-Pastwa triangulates data gathering
by combining comparable and parallel corpora of Polish legislation translated
inversely by three major publishing houses, as well as a reference corpus of nontranslated English statutes. This complex corpus architecture has been designed,
first, to identify differences between inversely translated and non-translated legis­
lation (contrasting the comparable corpus and the reference corpus) and, second,
to explain such differences by detecting through the parallel corpus which source
language patterns trigger them. Giczela-Pastwa explores selected multi-word

units connected with the structure of statutory content, which were identified
through shared keywords strongly overrepresented in translations. By closely read-­
ing concordances, she analyses collocational patterns of keywords through the
lens of the “untypical collocation hypothesis” (cf. Mauranen 2007). The study
confirms that legal translations develop their own distinctive phraseological patterns triggered mainly by source language interference. On the other hand, legal
translations show a considerable degree of resemblance between them, which
supports the levelling-out hypothesis (cf. Baker 1993). This method offers some
pedagogical potential by pinpointing patterns which are distorted or overused in
legal translation by non-native speakers of English. Such findings may contribute
to increasing the functionality of not-so-infrequent inverse translation.
Whereas Giczela-Pastwa pays attention to the consequences of the magnetising
effect of the source language in translated texts in terms of natural and fluent
language use, Miia Santalahti and Mikhail Mikhailov (“Language of treaties –
language of power relations?”) use corpus-based analysis in order to determine
to what extent the presence of uncommon elements in a given language may be
indicative of other extralinguistic factors, for instance of power relations which
might be reflected and negotiated or updated in certain texts. In this regard, as
part of a broader research project relying on the PEST corpus, a collection of
aligned bitexts consisting of bilateral treaties signed between Finland and Russia/
Soviet Union and between Finland and Sweden, as well as a number of treaties
between Sweden and Russia and international treaties used as a control corpus,
the authors analyse in depth the treaties concluded between Finland and Russia/
USSR from 1945 to 1991 in order to explore the correlation of linguistic features (e.g., unusual words and expressions, elements of polarised narratives, etc.)
and the political circumstances under which the signatory countries interacted.


6  Łucja Biel et al.
In this regard, in addition to determining that the Soviet party had a leading
role in the texts studied, in more general terms, the article clearly shows the
potential of methodological synergies for the investigation of legal translation.

In this particular case, quantitative methods (multidimensional and collostructional analysis, statistical scrutiny) are combined with the qualitative analysis of
discursive, semantic and conceptual features in such a way that associations may
be established between linguistic behaviour and larger issues involving relations
of power and authority. Complex research designs enable the further discovery
of legal translation as a social practice (Monzó Nebot 2015; Way 2016, p. 1018)
influenced by larger contextual factors, and replete with ideological implications
and ethical challenges.
Inspired by a similar goal, other contributions to this volume which also integrate theories and methodologies and which draw more clearly on qualitative
analysis show further interconnections between linguistic performance and
extratextual factors. Based on an experiment analysing the performance of experts
and non-experts, Anja Krogsgaard Vesterager highlights the importance of the
background of individual translators in legal translations as actual products in an
article which links the use of explicitation techniques to the degree of expertise
of practitioners. The article reports on a study based upon an experiment, in
which five expert translators and five non-experts translated a Spanish legal source
text into Danish. All of the translators were professionals. Expertise was set to be
equivalent with more than 10 years of professional practice, combined with a
specialisation in legal translation. The central method applied was contrastive text
analysis, assessing on a qualitative basis whether strategies of explicitation may
be found in the target text. The results were filtered in order to exclude such
explicitations that were due to contrastive linguistic differences between Spanish
and Danish at the system level. The qualitative analytical step is followed by a
quantification step in order to find out whether links may be established between
expertise in the sense investigated here and applying strategies of explicitation.
The tendency is that a link may be established: experts use considerably more
explicitations. However, the results indicate that two translators without specialisation in legal translation, but with long professional experience, perform almost
as many explicitations as experts. Hence, the choice of explicitation may be more
related to general long-term experience.
Whereas Krogsgaard Vesterager’s contribution emphasises the individual in
legal translation as an act of knowledge communication, a fact that has been

highlighted by post-structuralist approaches (Engberg 2016), complex research
architectures can also help underscore another dimension of legal translation
and interpreting – their embeddedness in institutional settings where all participants, including translators and interpreters, occupy and constantly negotiate their particular positions vis-à-vis other agents. Close examination reveals
that these positions are conditioned by prevailing expectations and power relations which, nevertheless, may in turn be redefined in context. In this regard,
by combining the analysis of a case study from the point of view of critical discourse analysis with interviews, Karolina Nartowska reflects on the influence


Introduction to research methods 7
that the subject positions adopted by legal interpreters in the courtroom might
exert on the power relations established during the triadic exchange. The contrast
between the views on the interpreter’s role as declared by the agents taking part
in the interaction and the actual performance of the interpreter in the courtroom
exposes clear divergences between foreseeable conduct and authentic practice.
What is more, the fact that, in the case study analysed, the deviations both from
these preconceptions and from professional standards do not meet the opposition of other co-agents contribute to a more nuanced understanding of legal
translation and interpreting as activities in which power plays a very important
role, both as a coercive force shaping behaviour and as agency to be executed and
realised by practitioners in context, in line with what has been underlined by the
so-called “power turn” in Translation Studies (Gentzler and Tymoczko 2002;
Strowe 2013; Vidal Claramonte 2018).
All these contributions certainly show how systematic research on legal translation allows for improvement by shedding light both on the problems that practitioners face and on the challenges that lie ahead both for the profession and for
research. In addition to identifying new avenues for research on legal translation
and interpreting, the conclusions of these case studies certainly foster a more
effective and conscious praxis, as well as a much-needed debate on the potentialities and limits of professional standards and ethics.
With the clear purpose of improving legal translation practice and research
models, some articles draw on relevant disciplines in order to build a more
solid interdisciplinary basis which might inform translators’ decisions and
researchers’ conclusions. In this regard, Sylvie Monjean-Decaudin and Joëlle
Popineau-Lauvray explore how Comparative Law might be integrated in
a systematic methodological approach to legal texts taking into account the

juridical cultures involved. In their chapter, they introduce a specific French
variant of Legal Translation Studies called Juritraductology (Juritraductologie),
developed with a special view to the context of legal studies. It draws specifically upon perspectives of translation rooted in views of law in general and
comparative law in particular. On this basis, the authors establish four translational contexts of specific interest for the approach (international public law,
international private law, judicial contexts, and scientific contexts). Furthermore, a scale for measuring the level of legal complexity (degré de juridicité) is
established, based on the criteria of how much legal knowledge is necessary in
order to understand and translate concepts and on the force of the legal consequences of the text. Within this framework, the authors suggest a three-step
methodology based upon Comparative Law to guide legal translators to be systematic in their quest for translation equivalents. The methodology consists of
three steps: (1) a semasiological step, in which the details of the source concept
are established; (2) a comparative-law step, in which potential renderings in
the target culture are scrutinised in order to establish overlaps and differences
between concepts; and (3) an ontological step, in which the translator decides
on which term to choose for translation in the respective situations on linguistic and legal grounds.


8  Łucja Biel et al.
Carmen Bestué also demonstrates the relevance of the applicability of Comparative Law as a solid foundation for legal translation and court interpreting. In
a contribution which stresses the importance of integrating a systematic methodological approach to terms and concepts in a decision-making process which
is subject to differing acceptability expectations depending on context, Bestué
emphasises both the need to strive for quality and conceptual rigour in legal
translation and interpreting and the “intervening” role of translators and interpreters, a point that has also been made in research drawing on sociological and
post-structuralist approaches to legal translation (Monzó 2005; Monzó Nebot
2015; Way 2016; Vidal Claramonte 2005; Martín Ruano 2014, 2015) and which
can also be seen to be linked to specific calls for an integrative, multi-perspectivist approach to translation-relevant comparisons of legal concepts (Engberg
2017). In this regard, Bestué argues that in-depth research applying comparative
law principles needs to be coupled with critical attention to the communicative
purpose of the TT and to additional factors including diatopic variation, legal
field and applicable law. All these aspects prove to be decisive for the selection
of adequate and acceptable translation strategies, which need to be attuned to
contexts. In an attempt to provide tools to deal with legal terms that, as Bestué

underlines, are not static, the author proposes the “translation-oriented terminological entry” as a model in which to integrate comparative analysis of legal
terms and actual translation solutions in order to facilitate the decision-making of
legal translators and interpreters. Certainly, any measure for improvement needs
to depart from a clear image of the actual reality of the profession and the profile
of practitioners. The entry, indeed, has been developed in the framework of two
research projects (Law10n and TIPp) presented in the article which precisely
depart from a descriptive analysis of existing practices in particular contexts as
a stepping stone to the proposal of methodological tools that may assist legal
translators and interpreters in adopting translation choices in different scenarios.
The chapter entitled “A mixed-methods approach in Corpus-Based Interpreting Studies: quality of interpreting in criminal proceedings in Spain” by Mariana
Orozco-Jutorán also reports on the methodological aspects of the TIPp project
attempting to operationalise and measure the quality of legal interpreting during
criminal trials. The project used an eclectic mix of quantitative and qualitative
methods, starting with a compilation of a corpus of transcribed video-recorded
criminal proceedings involving interpreters in three language combinations.
Although corpus methods have become mainstream in legal translation research,
they are seldom applied to study interpreting, where sociological approaches
seem to be dominant. One of the key reasons for this status quo is the timeconsuming and tedious nature of transcribing interpreting; yet Orozco-Jutorán’s
ambitious project proves it is feasible and demonstrates how corpus methods
may be adjusted for interpreting purposes. Adopting Wadensjö’s (1998) dialogic approach to interpreting as “talk as activity” (in addition to “talk as text”),
Orozco-Jutorán introduces two dependent variables: text-related problems and
interaction-related problems, and assigns quantifiable indicators to them. The
interpreting corpus was annotated manually for solutions adopted by interpreters


Introduction to research methods 9
when facing these two groups of problems and next analysed quantitatively. What
is worth stressing is the collection of corpus data in three language combinations
which show a different intensity of problems and allow for more valid generalisations. The project brings some alarming empirical findings on the low quality of
court interpreting, in particular as regards non-renditions and meaning distortions, which ultimately might adversely affect defendants’ right of information

safeguarded under Directive 2012/13/EU.
In the last two contributions, the emphasis turns to surveys and interviews as
tools for conducting research and gathering empirical data in LTS. In particular, in
her chapter entitled “An online survey as a means to research the ‘outstitutional’
legal translation market”, Juliette Scott reports on a survey consisting of online
questionnaires to collect both quantitative and qualitative data regarding the commissioning and performance of legal translation that is being carried out outside
institutions. Scott triangulates input from those outsourcing, i.e. in the case at
hand mostly lawyers, and those to whom work is outsourced, i.e. legal translators,
in order to investigate the area of outsourced legal translation in a comprehensive way. Yet, she does not report on the findings of the study (see Scott 2016
for a detailed discussion of the survey results); instead, she focuses on the use of
online questionnaires for the collection and extraction of data. After providing a
list of surveys from the past 20 years, she turns her attention to the strengths of
online questionnaires, i.e. the fact that they allow data subjects to engage with the
questions at their leisure, to retain their anonymity and to participate remotely,
as well as the fact that they allow a quick turnaround for data collection and a
more streamlined data analysis. More importantly, the author goes on to address
the challenges which emerge when researching corporate and legal communication through online questionnaires, ethical as well as epistemological, i.e. accessing
respondents, deciding on the nature and order of questions, selecting the online
platform (e.g. SurveyMonkey.com, Wufoo), using data analysis sofware (e.g.
NVivo, Dedoose), piloting and coding, and analysing the responses. The author’s
own study reveals that online questionnaires allow researchers to access a wide
audience, both geographically and in terms of respondent profiles, and to gain
insights into a wide range of language pairs, genres, jurisdictions and areas of law.
Esther Monzó-Nebot’s contribution, based on the sociology of the professions, starts with a review of the sociological approaches to Translation and Interpreting (TIS) and to legal TIS which aim to describe and explain how translators
and interpreters individually and collectively construct and interact with social
structures and are characterised by a broad scope (e.g. focus on interactions, attitudes and perceptions, power construction, ideological conflicts, etc.). She then
analyses a research study that aims at defining the factors impacting translators’
and interpreters’ interactional and structural power through the use of in-depth
interviews conducted among translators working for international organisations
and court interpreters. The study is part of a wider project on legal interpreters’

and translators’ habiti, where they are interviewed about their socialisations, relations to others in professional settings, their subjective well-being and their perceptions on different issues related to their translation-related doxas and illusios


10  Łucja Biel et al.
(Bourdieu 1972). Two data analysis techniques are used, i.e. content analysis
(Berelson 1971; Neuendorf 2002; Krippendorff 2013; Mayring 2014) and narrative analysis (Mishler 1995), and the findings of the study suggest that, by
framing themselves as high-status or low-status translators, the subjects created a
projected social reality which they enacted in interaction. They also reveal differences both in the perception and in the enactment of status, prestige and power.
More importantly, the study affirms that in-depth interviews can be of particular
importance to legal TIS as they enable insights into a complex network of interactions that resists simplification. The conclusions of both these studies which
cross boundaries among theoretical approaches to build complex methodological models certainly provide a solid foundation on which to base new research
initiatives, as well as to promote new professional attitudes, discourses and praxis.
All the contributions to this volume show that legal translation and interpreting are certainly very complex and challenging tasks in which many factors are
involved and need to be taken into account, and, which, for the same reason,
thus require the construction of similarly complex and challenging models. Making advances in the directions outlined in a special issue on Research Models and
Methods in Legal Translation edited by Biel and Engberg (2013), this volume
discusses methodological issues in researching legal translation and interpreting,
overviewing varied methods and approaches and ways to triangulate them, with
the goal of contributing to mapping and stimulating new models which cross
and move theoretical and disciplinary boundaries in order to better grasp the
many-sidedness of legal translation and interpreting as social activities; and models which, hopefully, might also help researchers and practitioners to continue
crossing and moving boundaries, either by engaging in further research aiming
at identifying the challenges that lie ahead for legal translation and interpreting
and attempting to provide answers to its requirements, either by taking informed
decisions in their daily practice, perhaps inspired by the findings of studies conducted with ever more complex research models.
LTI is an expanding area of interest, with an increasing community of researchers and expert practitioners interested in the progress of the discipline. With its
focus on research methods and its commitment to crossing boundaries with the
aim of shedding light on the workings of legal translation and interpreting as
complex social activities influenced by a myriad of textual, contextual and sociopolitical factors, we hope the volume is of special interest to researchers on legal
translation and interpreting, to practicing legal translators and interpreters, and

to translation and interpreting trainers.

References
Angelelli, C.V. and Baer, B.J., eds. (2015). Researching translation and interpreting.
London: Routledge.
Baker, M. (1993). Corpus linguistics and translation studies – implications and applications. In: M. Baker, et al., eds. Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 233–250.